It’s been about a year since Brightcove released the last upgrade to its professional online video platform with Brightcove 3. On Monday, it’s going to release Brightcove 4, and it’s a massive upgrade.

Brightcove 4 now supports a native video player on the iPhone, in Facebook, and live video streaming on the Web. It’s got Twitter integration for sharing videos, faster-loading video players, the ability to switch between Flash streaming and HTTP, adaptive streaming based on a user’s device and bandwidth, behind-the-firewall video delivery, support for most major ad servers, better analytics, and a new, cheaper, entry-level subscription service called Brightcove Express.

The biggest new feature is the iPhone player. Instead of clicking off into the Quicktime player, Brightcove uses the Quicktime APIs to render the player within an app. Developers are going to love this because they can skin the player any way they want, tie it into the same ads served through a publisher’s Brightcove player on the Web, add email and Twitter sharing, and Coverflow-style browsing.

The Facebook integration will also be popular. Brightcove 4 offers a template which allows for Facebook Connect logins with realtime comments which appear in each commenter’s Facebook stream. Brightcove videos shared on Facebook will also be playable within the stream, just like YouTube videos.

Brightcove 4 will also support live video streams for the first time. Live videos of events can be scheduled, archived, mixed with on-demand videos, and tied into the same advertising backend. If a publisher has a huge event and would rather use their own CDN, they can do that as well. Why now? “We waited until there was sufficient market demand,” says CEO Jeremy Allaire. Yet more evidence that live video on the Web may be finding its legs.

So far Brightcove is mostly used by media companies and professional video publishers who can afford to pay at least $500 a month for the service. But with this release, Brightcove is also trying to broaden its appeal with service plans which now begin at $99 a month. It’s still not a consumer platform, and probably never will be. But for professional Web video publishers and companies with video marketing budgets, the new entry point should help to expand Brightcove’s market.

I am not sure why Brightcove holds all of this good stuff back until they can package it in a new, numbered release, since it is a Web-based service, which could just as easily upgrade on a rolling basis. But doing it all at once like this does highlight all the changes to the code-base, and shows why Brightcove is considered the leading Web video platform for professional use. Brightcove boast 800 customers which use its players across 2,500 different Web sites. Collectively, they reach 135 million unique viewers per month, according to Allaire.

He won’t disclose exact revenues other than to say that it is in the “tens of millions” of dollars a year, and growing at a 50 percent annual rate. But he does say that the company, which has raised a total of $91 million in venture capital, isn’t burning any more cash. “During the first half of this year we were profitable and cash flow positive,” he says. Like everyone else, Brightcove cut back on expenses last year, and even went through layoffs of 13 percent of its workforce. The fourth quarter was the low point, but demand started picking up again at the beginning of the year, especially from branded goods companies, marketing departments, and even manufacturers looking to add video to their sites. Last quarter, Allaire hired 30 people, and currently employs 180. Next quarter he is looking to hire 30 more.

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This is growing into quite a saturated field with players like Ooyala, Brightcove, MIG69 and Swarmcast fighting hard for pieces of the pie.

Spotlight is an entirely SaaS-based platform that wants to make it easier for businesses to maintain a social network for video or channel campaigns, make money on their library of professional content via video advertising, distribute videos in playlists through a brand’s library of content with a custom design that fits their brand specs, and more.

In essence, the software is designed to allow businesses to create a micro-community around content and utilize a feedback mechanism which allows them to publish content across various destinations but see and evaluate that feedback in one centralized location.

Pricing is unclear but it will be based on usage and consists of a monthly fee that includes storage and a bandwidth delivery fee. There’s a free 30-day trial for you to give it a spin.

Update: pricing details came in: the monthly fee is set to $1,000, delivery fee is variable and based on usage (per GB) and 100 GB is included.

Reality Digital is venture capital-backed; it has raised $8.3 million to date, most recently closing a $6.3 million Series B round back in March 2008. It has signed up an impressive roster of clients the past few years, including Nokia, MTV, Pepsi, NFL and Hyundai.

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Did you know that FAIL Blog serves up 22 million video views per month, and Engadget gets at least 2.3 million monthly views for its gadget videos, while Joystiq gets another 2 million? All three blogs use Viddler, which is now selling ads directly for its top content providers though its just-launched Viddler AdWorks. Advertisers can see a directory of the top three dozen video producers on Viddler and buy ads on their videos (overlay, pre-roll, and post-roll).

Viddler is selling ads against 30 million views a month collectively from those top producers, out of a total of 36 million views for all the videos uploaded to Viddler. FAIL Blog, which puts up videos of pratfalls and people acting stupidly, on its own accounts for 73 percent of Viddler’s video ad inventory, and is a big reason Viddler’s total views have gone from 10 million in January, 2009 to 36 million in August, 2009. After that, the most popular Viddler producers are Engadget and Joystiq, which are both owned by AOL, followed by niche video like WineLibraryTV (142,424 monthly views) and Gary Vaynerchuk’s personal marketing videos, which get only 27,070 views per month).

It quickly dwindles down to very small numbers per show, but Viddler is hoping to change that with its new ad network, and get more of its partners to put more of their best videos on Viddler instead of on YouTube or Blip.tv or Brightcove. As big as FAIL Blog is for Viddler, it streams even more videos directly on YouTube, where it has the 7th-most watched channel.

For ads that Viddler sells directly it is offering video partners ad rates starting at $3 per thousand views (CPMs) for overlays and $10 for pre-rolls. A video show that attracts a highly-focused, affluent niche audience like WineLibrary.TV can command a $10 CPM for overlays. These rates compare to about 80-cent CPMs that video producers currently get for the Google AdWords ads Viddler places in their videos today, and will continue to use for any inventory it can’t sell.

The other attractive element of Viddler’s AdWorks is that video publishers can choose to sell their own ads if they think they can get a higher rate than Viddler. In that case, they pay Viddler a flat $2 CPM for overlays, and $4 CPMs for pre-rolls. So if AOL’s (or Engadget’s) salesforce can get better than a $5 CPM for overlay ads, it is better off selling ads itself ($5-$2=the $3 CPM they would get from Viddler selling the ads).

Video partners also have the option to sign up for a business account, where they pay per gigabyte and can either opt out of ads entirely or participate in AdWorks to offset their subscription costs. So Viddler straddles the video hosting space between a free ad-supported model (like Blip.tv) and a hosted subscription model (like Brightcove). A video producer will have to weigh that flexibility and the guaranteed CPMs Viddler is offering against the broader reach of a YouTube or even Blip.tv, which is about twice the size of Viddler in terms of videos streamed and can now place ads in YouTube as well.

Viddler remains a niche player in the online video hosting industry, but it’s never taken VC money and seems to be carving out a nice little business for itself.

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With the news surrounding the implosion of Joost and the startup’s move towards providing white label video platforms for companies, we thought it would be a good idea to check in with one of Joost’s new competitors. As we wrote in our post about Joost’s prospects as a white label video community provider, there is already plenty of competition, including Brightcove, Magnify, and Ooyala.

Brightcove is perhaps the best-known player in the space. But another one which has been relatively successful in creating interactive video sites for brands is Magnify.net. The video hosting and sharing platform, which launched in 2007, is rapidly growing its white label service and is expected to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year, according to co-founder Steve Rosenbaum.

Magnify has recently partnered with several sites to power their video aggregation platforms, including deals with Etsy, CarsonDaly.TV, and Bicycling.com. Magnify has also created white label video channels for Zappos, New York Magazine and The Weather Channel.

Bicycling.com recently decided to shift from Magnify’s competitor Brightcove to power its platform for original content. The cycling site is launching its Magnify-powered site in conjunction with its coverage of the Tour de France, which starts July 4th. It was attracted by Magnify’s social features, such as the ability to pull UGC videos from sites like YouTube and updates from Twitter. Bicycling.com online editor David L’Heureux plans to integrate Twitter streams onto the platform from cycling all-stars like Lance Armstrong. Magnify also allows the online magazine to aggregate a mix of videos and makes it easy for the site to offer readers external videos and internal media that is created by Bicycling.com.

Additionally, Magnify is creating subject-driven channels, such as IranLive, that aggregates video content around a specific topic and also integrates live Twitter streams with the mentions of that topic. The IranLive Twitter stream has filters that remove any Tweets with derogatory or abusive language.

What does the Joost white-label service do again?

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Now we’ve learned Yahoo is going to kill Maven Networks instead, the most recent in a long series of deadpooling of products and services by the Sunnyvale Internet behemoth. A tipster, who works for a large media company, tells us that he has been a Maven customer for years and was informed last week that Yahoo will cease all development on the platform and will no longer be supporting it in 2010.

We’ve confirmed with another source that Yahoo has effectively decided to shelve Maven, firing most of its employees in a move packaged as a restructuring and has already notified customers that the product will no longer be supported as of next year. Furthermore, the source tells us that the Maven technology has never even been used for Yahoo’s own video properties, underscoring why the quote I lifted from the press release in the first paragraph of this post sounds so void today.

Update: we received a statement from Yahoo about this:

“Since acquiring Maven Networks in 2008, Maven has played an important role in our video strategy, providing essential talent and core technology that has helped Yahoo! to enhance its consumer and advertising offerings. Maven technology is used in the Yahoo video player, as well as in the Yahoo Video Advertising Platform that is being used to serve both on- and off- network advertising for Yahoo! partners.

While video initiatives remain a priority for Yahoo!, both for its consumer and advertising experiences, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others. After careful consideration, Yahoo! is planning to wind down its Maven Networks customer base. This decision will allow us to focus our resources on the continued improvement of our core video offerings, such as enhancing the consumer video experience on Yahoo!. Since Q4 2008, we have closed or announced our intention to close, nearly twenty Yahoo! services– such as Yahoo! 360, GeoCities, My Web and Yahoo! Briefcase. We continue to evaluate our portfolio of products and services on a regular basis, and plan to share details of further changes with people who use our products in the months ahead.”

Yahoo also said that the rumor about the Maven team being mostly laid off is inaccurate.

There’s always the possibility that the platform will eventually live on under different ownership of course, but rest assured that competitors like Brightcove, Ooyala and KIT Digital are currently celebrating over the news.

This is the third video property Yahoo has killed off in less than 8 months, after shutting both Y!Live, a live video streaming service, and Jumpcut, an online video editing tool. Remarkably, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz recently declared on stage at a conference that the company is actually still interested in acquiring startups in the business of digital video technology.

One month and the shuttering of a $160 million video technology acquisition later, it’s close to comical reading those words again. Then again, Yahoo’s prospects and financials at the time the acquisition was made sure looked a whole lot better than they do today, so maybe it’s just too easy to judge the move in hindsight.

Either way, Maven Networks is now a member of the deadpool club, although there’s always the possibility of Yahoo selling off Maven to someone who wants to revive it.

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Of course, it’s just a matter of the right people to sign on the right dotted lines to get other Brightcove-supported sites and services onto the Vudu. Ad-supported content is being tentatively embraced by big media, which is almost certainly a good thing, and this is one of the first real forays into pushing it onto a set-top box. A year ago, I would have considered the idea of Sony letting me stream their content onto my TV for free a ridiculous notion, but here we are. Pleasant surprises are mighty rare in this sector.

The battle for the top of the TV set (or in the closet nearby for wifi-enabled ones like the Vudu) is getting pretty heated, and major deals like this tip the balance of power significantly. Plus, it ends up being good for the consumer as they pack more and more into a box you already paid for.

We’ve just got our one screenshot for now, but tomorrow we’ll try to put up some video so you can see how she handles.

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In an age when anyone with a video-capable cell phone can have their own TV channel on the Web, it is still the celebrities and rock stars who are getting all the views (just as on Twitter they get the most followers). Kyte CEO Daniel Graf knows this fact all too well. Of the 215,000 video channels on Kyte, nearly all are created by consumers, but only about 1,000 account for more than 90 percent of the mobile videos streamed via the service. And those 1,000 channels are invariably the work of professionals or the cell-phone videos of famous people such as musicians Lady Gaga (iTunes link) and Soulja Boy (iTunes link)

In April, Kyte streamed 50 million videos across the Web, mobile devices, and social networks. Just to put those 50 million video streams into perspective, that is half the number of videos streamed in March, 2009 by AOL, the tenth ranked video site in the U.S. (Hulu, which is No, 3, streamed 380 million videos).

Today, Kyte is launching iPhone apps for partners including MTV, the NBA, Spin Magazine, the rock band No Doubt, and the Los Angeles radio station KCRW, which is using the app to highlight videos of bands playing live in its studios. Some of these apps are tailored to specific events such as the MTV Movie Awards and the NBA Playoffs (iTunes link). Kyte creates iPhone apps as a turnkey service, with the ability to add different modular features to each app. These features include video shows based on mobile Kyte uploads; blog, news, and Twitter feeds; live chat; a presence indicator showing how many other people are currently in the app; music or video downloads via the iTunes store; location-aware event listings for tour dates and other listings, mobile Web access, and custom modules such as basketball scores

Kyte is taking off, but not because of user-generated videos. Rather it is trying to cash in on the premium slice of video content out there, much like Hulu is for Web video. The difference is that Kyte creates consistent branded video experiences across Websites, social networks, and mobile devices. Graf doesn’t see Kyte competing so much against Qik and UStream on the mobile live streaming video front as it does against Brightcove in the enterprise video publishing. Pitches Graf: “We are cheaper than Brightcove and you get mobile as well and Twitter and Facebook.”

Kyte wants to become the one-stop shop for major talent and media brands, wrapping their Websites and iPhone apps around mobile video. My problem with the apps is that they are only as good as the content they showcase. The iPhone apps are very consumption-oriented. For instance, Twitter is treated as nothing more than a straight, one-way feed instead of turning letting fans Tweet back from within the app.

In the video below, which I took last week when Graf visited my office, he talks about the new iPhone apps, how the Kyte platform ties together mobile, Web, social Networks, and Twitter, and how he sees Brightcove as his biggest competition:

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While the name is virtually impossible to remember, Fliqz has a solid offering with plug-and-play video solutions for small businesses looking to host company videos on a branded video player, with an application set that includes capturing, uploading, hosting and monetizing videos. The startup offers a basic package for free with an ad-supported video player service but also delivers solutions from $99 to $999 per month (with a $7500 development fee for the latter package).

According to the announcement, which wasn’t supposed to be officially released until the end of this month, Fliqz has more than 35,000 online video publishers using its platform, including notable ones likes Monster.com, Major League Baseball, Movable Type, PBwiki, Military.com and many more. The company intends to use the funds for ramping up its sales efforts, further product development and international expansion.

Fliqz competes against companies like Brightcove, KIT digital, Ooyala, PermissionTV and a slew of similar service providers.

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Web video platform Brightcove has so many API partners just two months after the release of Brightcove 3 that it had to create an alliance to contain them all. Actually, the Brightcove Alliance is more of a marketing exercise to acknowledge and promote its API partners. Nevertheless, nearly 100 companies (including Yahoo, AOL, DoubleClick, Veoh, Metacafe, Slide, Meebo, Blinkx, Sprout, Clearspring, and Visible Measures) have implemented the API in less than two months. (Update: In other news which we noted in our Layoff Tracker, the company let go 25 people last week, or 15 percent of its workforce. Brightcove still employs 147 people).

When Brightcove 3 launched, it greatly expanded its set of APIs. As I wrote back then:

More APIs. Brightcove already has APIs that let developers customize its video player. Now it is opening that up to developers who want to write plug-ins for social commentary tools (JS-KIT did this), contextual advertising, or analytics. The company is also releasing syndication APIs for controlling the advertising for each video no matter where it appears. And its Brightcove Media APIs will make each video visible to search engines and make it easier to add related videos, and other contextual information. Each Brightcove video will now have its own unique URL. The Media API will allow publishers to exact programming information from the videos so they can insert it into the HTML of each page.

The new APIs cover everything from advertising and analytics to mobile, search, and social media. Video portals like Veoh and Metacafe, for instance, are using the APIs to play videos from Brightcove partners wrapped in players that look like their own, but extend the reporting and advertising afforded to the video owners through Brightcove. Similarly, Meebo now supports Brightcove videos in its IM environment, as do Sprout and Clearspring in their widgets. JS-KIT and Intense Debate are using the APIs to allow Brightcove video publishers to add commenting features to their videos. Advertising partners from DoubleClick to 24/7 Media can now plug their ads into Brightcove as well.

Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire likens the Alliance to App Exchange for Salesforce.com, where “customers can snap something in without doing any additional work. A partial list of partners is below, or you can explore more here. And here is an example of an API integrations in widget from DotSub, which offers subtitle translation for any Brightcove video:

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This lovely lady is doing a full-nude striptease (we’ve altered the image), along with an Office Depot advertisement promising “Free Delivery.” Which on second thought may be a brilliant idea.

If you’d like to see the evidence for yourself, the not-safe-for-work video is here, or just do a search for “new test” in the marketplace.

And if you’re looking for the closest Office Depot, you can find it here.

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On the heels of announcing an expanded relationship with the New York Times website last week, Brightcove is adding all of AOL to its video-distribution client list. Like the New York Times, AOL is an investor in Brightcove.

But the deal is a coup for Brightcove 3, the latest version of its online video platform. Brightcove 3 will power all the video on AOL, which is one of the top ten destinations on the Web for video.

The custom Brightcove video player will be integrated with AOL’s Platform-A advertising network. AOL is essentially outsourcing its video content distribution to Brightcove. Now all the company needs to do is land a big deal with a top-ten video destination that is not an investor.

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The New York Times is hurting financially these days, and its online business doesn’t seem to be helping much, but at least it keeps pushing forward. One area where the NYTimes.com has put a lot of effort is in video, and it has just redesigned its video page around the new Brightcove 3 player.

Previously, the NYTimes was using the FeedRoom as its main video platform. (This swap doesn’t come out of the blue. The New York Times is an investor in Brightcove). I know of at least one more large video site that is going to announce it is switching to BrightCove 3 next week (more on that later). In the case of the NYTimes.com, one of the things Briightcove 3 will allow it to do is eventually stream HD-quality video and distribute that video elsewhere. As of now, the video is closer to DVD-quality at 1.5 megabits per second, but the site has standardized around the 16:9 landscape aspect ratio most HD video is shot in. (Brightcove 3 dynamically adjusts the resolution of the video stream to whatever the viewer can handle based on player size and bandwidth).

One thing the NYTimes needs to fix is video search. On the video page there is a box that says “Search Video,” but it brings up general results. Another flaw is that The NYTimes does not allow its videos to be embedded elsewhere, only shared via links. Lame.

I’ve embedded an interview with the NYT’s video and television director Ann Derry below from Beet.TV explaining the changes.

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A couple days ago, we posted some leaked screenshots of Brightcove 3, the completely gutted and rebuilt Web video platform from Brightcove that is launching on Tuesday. I was able to catch up with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, who gave me an update on the company and took me through all the changes in the service.

Brightcove is a Web video publishing platform that has raised $91 million and boasts hundreds of major media brands as its customers, including Dow Jones, Showtime (Dexter, The Tudors), Lifetime, AMC (Mad Men), Time magazine, and the New York Times. TV networks, magazines, newspapers, and music companies all use Brightcove to distribute and manage video on their sites and across the Web. Increasingly, so do big corporations like Sun Microsystems, universities like NYU, and political organizations like the Obama campaign.

Allaire says that, collectively, his customers are distributing Web video at the rate of “several hundred million streams per month,” which would make Brightcove one of the top ten video networks. It would still be well below No. 1 YouTube, which is streaming five billion videos a month, but perhaps within spitting distance of No. 2 Fox Interactive/MySpace (446 million streams) or No. 3 Microsoft (286 million streams).

As far as Brightcove’s financial situation goes, Allaire would only say:

We are not profitable, but our burn rate continues to go down. We don’t expect to have to raise additional money based on our growth.

The Boston-based company now has 160 employees, and is spreading internationally. Europe now represents 20 percent of revenues and 34 percent of bookings, up from zero twelve months ago. And Alliare launched a separately capitalized Japanese subsidiary in May.

With Brightcove 3, the company is introducing a streamlined user interface and a whole new set of capabilities. These include a new markup language for creating video players called the Brightcove Experience Markup Language (BEML), new APIs for customers and developers, and intelligent streaming technology that dynamically changes the video quality based on the viewer’s device and bandwith limitations.

Here is a summary of the new features in Brightcove 3:

1. Custom Players. New APIs allow deeper customization of the Brightcove video players and viewing experience.  The Brightcove Experience Markup Language makes it easy for any Web developer who knows HTML to create sophisticated stylings, social tools, and video-player navigation options.
2. Pricing.  Brightcove is going from one flat-rate pricing to three different tiers (basic, professional, and enterprise).  Subscriptions start at thousands of dollars per year and go up to hundreds of thousands for enterprise customers.
3. Dynamic Delivery. Each video stream is optimized on the fly, based on a viewer’s bandwidth and factors such as the size of the player. Brightcove 3 automatically creates multiple renditions of each video appropriate for everything from mobile to HD viewing.
4. More APIs.  Brightcove already has APIs that let developers customize its video player.  Now it is opening that up to developers who want to write plug-ins for social commentary tools (JS-KIT did this), contextual advertising, or analytics.  The company is also releasing syndication APIs for controlling the advertising for each video no matter where it appears. And its Brightcove Media APIs will make each video visible to search engines and make it easier to add related videos, and other contextual information. Each Brightcove video will now have its own unique URL.  The Media API will allow publishers to extact programming information from the videos so they can insert it into the HTML of each page.

On this last point, Allaire says:

YouTube has taught us all this lesson. Every video has its own page that has 20 different ways to the next video.

And in the face of the overwhelming dominance of YouTube, how do you see Brightcove videos there? Allaire’s answer:

You don’t and you don’t need to. You find it in Google. Video is a media type. It is a powerful medium for communications. Broadband internet will drive video. Traffic will flow across Websites.

Maybe some day, but right now it still looks like a winner-take-all game. Allaire thinks he can change that.

Here is an interview with Allaire about Brightcove 3 from Beet.TV:

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Back in June, we noted:

The new publishing model centers around Brightcove’s first server-side API, which allows publishers to deeply integrate video meta data into their display pages. Publishers can choose to highlight related videos in ways that make the most sense for their content (perhaps by organizing them into lists that can be browsed by topics or names). They can also display descriptions, and choose URLs, that optimize SEO. As far as monetization is concerned, in-page advertisements can be synchronized with in-video ads to make for more effective impressions.

. . . Brightcove 3 has been blessed with a new user interface that doesn’t require publishers to skip around between tabs to address different parts of the setup process. An iTunes-looking control panel takes advantage of drag-n-drop and batch editing capabilities, which should streamline the addition and editing of videos.

Yesterday, we received the leaked screenshots below, and paired them with the corresponding current sections of the Web software. As far as we know, they’ve never been seen before outside the private beta. Judging by the screenshots, Brightcove 3 is much more visual, intuitive, and offers Web video publishers a ton more options than before. Click on each screenshot for a larger image.

Here is the new start page (top) versus the current dashboard (bottom):

Brightcove lets customers customize their video players. Here is the new video player styling editor (top) versus the current one (bottom):

Here is the new title editor (top) versus the current one (bottom). Notice how the ability to add tags and pick video stills and thumbnails is put right up front:

The advertising options are also being expanded. Brightcove 3 (top) looks like it will have options for different ad policies and ad types (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) per player. Currently (bottom), users can pick “advertising” or “no advertising”:

And, I think this might be new, Brightcove 3 will create “multiple renditions” of each video in different standards (VP6 and H.264) and different bit rates (360, 512, 900, and 1,500 kbps), depending, presumably, on the viewer’s bandwidth and software:

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Earlier this week I had the chance to sit down and meet with a few members of the Brightcove team, including founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire. We discussed the direction that online video was taking and the stratification seen between consumer and professional markets. And perhaps most interestingly, Allaire was willing to discuss the failures that Brightcove (and the online video space as a whole) has had to grapple with.

Since its launch in 2005 Brightcove has accrued customers spanning television, print media, and the music industry, who use the service to manage their online video content. The company has also seen a rapidly growing base of customers from more unlikely verticals, including biotech the pharmaceutical industry. And the service has seen explosive growth abroad, with foreign markets now accounting for 20% of the company’s revenues after only one year.

But despite the company’s success, there is still widespread confusion as to what Brightcove and other video platforms actually do. For years, many people have lumped services like Brightcove alongside consumer portals like YouTube and Metacafe, but the two represent entirely different markets.

In reality these services have little in common besides a Flash-based movie player. Brightcove and its competitors offer a cloud-based software service that caters to the professional market, essentially allowing companies to outsource their online video component. This extends beyond just a media player – Brightcove also manages advertising analytics, ensures that content is properly “plugged in” to the rest of each customer’s site, and offers a set of content management and programming tools. Conversely, YouTube et al. are geared towards amateurs looking for a place to easily put their content on the web.

Much of the confusion stems from semantics – both sets of services could be called “video platforms”. That said, Brightcove is also partially responsible for the confusion, as it actually did used to offer a YouTube-esque consumer site called Brightcove.TV that was put on the backburner in late 2007. The company has since shifted its full attention to its B2B offering.

While Brightcove has seen more than its share of success, underperformers like Brightcove.TV have made it clear that online video may not developed exactly as the company hoped it would. When the market first began to take off, there was a widespread belief that millions of prospective amateur content creators would be able to monetize their videos, driving a massive stream of long tail revenue. Allaire says that this has largely failed to materialize – while there have been some successful video creators, the concept of a long tail video market simply hasn’t become a viable business.

Another area where online video distribution is largely failing is in the transition from the computer to the television. Allaire explains that he envisions a “democratization of video” that hasn’t happened, largely because of proprietary formats and licensing issues that have plagued the industry. Because there is little Brightcove can do to address the issue, Allarie has written an open letter to the consumer electronics industry, but it’s unlikely we’ll see the open standards we all long for any time soon.

Finally, Allaire acknowledged that the idea of for-pay online content has been largely a failure (though he says this is less of a disappointment). Brightcove invested heavily in producing a platform for paid media content, but the market for this hasn’t materialized. He says that even well received marketplaces like Apple’s iTunes TV and Movie stores have seen disappointing results, and we probably won’t see a wider adoption until the consumer electronics industry breaks down the aforementioned barriers.

Over the next few months, Brightcove will be rolling out its gutted and rebuilt third revision to the public (the new version is currently in a private beta). From there, Allaire predicts that the site will continue to make inroads internationally and with with less “conventional” media creators as more companies turn to video platforms to handle even occasional content posts. Other players in the video platform space include Maven Networks, Move Networks, Delve Networks, and Ooyala.

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You could say we were less than enthused when writing about the launch of Graspr last September. The nascent instructional video site captured our attention because it was led by an ex-Yahoo VP, but it didn’t really do anything to stand out from the crowd.

It turns out we weren’t the only ones to notice the service needed a little something extra. Graspr has shifted its strategy away from developing a destination site for instructional videos and towards an aggregation and syndication network for those videos. Along the way, it has also picked up $2.5 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and angels. And it’s rolled out a new design with additional functionality centered around what it’s calling “connected learning”.

Graspr now has a feed tool that pulls instructional videos from across the web and includes them in its repository of content. These videos fall into 17 categories such as home improvement, food and drink, sports and recreation, and crafts. They are then syndicated out to a network of publishers that want to compliment their existing content. About 200 such publishers have signed up during a closed beta period of the syndication service, although CEO Teresa Phillips thinks there are about 2,000 sites per category that would make good partners. These are mostly sites that provide text-based instructions and want to integrate more rich media into their offerings.

As for making money off this network, Graspr intends to run video overlays and split the revenue three ways between itself, the content producers, and the end publishers. There is also an opportunity for advertisers to sponsor video players and wrap them in their branding (apparently educational service companies are the most eager to build their brands in this manner). In the longer term, Phillips anticipates that product placement will become an increasingly important way for Graspr to monetize its videos.

Will the strategy succeed? It’s too early to tell, but if Brightcove is any indication, Graspr should resist setting its expectations too high. We hear that its syndication platform – albeit intended for a broader range of content – has been only a modest success. Perhaps Graspr will find that its publisher niche is particularly eager to integrate 3rd party video content – especially if that video can be monetized effectively.

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Not a week after we derided Brightcove for its difficult user interface in a story about newly emerged competitor Delve Networks, the Cambridge-based video hosting company is releasing a completely rebuilt version of its service into private beta.

Existing SaaS customers now have the opportunity to try out Brightcove 3 Beta, which will be made available to new customers sometime in the Fall. Development on Brightcove 3 began about nine months ago and has focused on three primary areas: a new publishing model, support for long-form video and, last but not least, an improved user interface.

The new publishing model centers around Brightcove’s first server-side API, which allows publishers to deeply integrate video meta data into their display pages. Publishers can choose to highlight related videos in ways that make the most sense for their content (perhaps by organizing them into lists that can be browsed by topics or names). They can also display descriptions, and choose URLs, that optimize SEO. As far as monetization is concerned, in-page advertisements can be synchronized with in-video ads to make for more effective impressions.

Brightcove has never put any limits on the lengths of the video uploaded to its platform, but until now it never tailored the delivery of longer video to users’ technical capabilities. The new version places Move Networks (a platform that specializes in the delivery of long form video) in its sights by adjusting delivery quality based on bandwidth and computational power. Brightcove wishes to become the single platform that publishers use to deliver both short and long form content, without requiring users to install a proprietary plugin, as Move Networks does (Brightcove delivers its video through Flash).

Finally, Brightcove 3 has been blessed with a new user interface that doesn’t require publishers to skip around between tabs to address different parts of the setup process. An iTunes-looking control panel takes advantage of drag-n-drop and batch editing capabilities, which should streamline the addition and editing of videos.

Brightcove is certainly one of the biggest, if not the biggest, video platforms for web publishers. According to internal statistics, the videos on its platform are viewed by 135 million uniques per month, and revenues experienced 500% growth in 2007. Publishers include Discovery, National Geographic, Showtime, and several other big media companies.

The company hopes that this release will help it expand internationally (it already has a strong presence in the UK and has taken direct steps to establish one in Japan). Brightcove is also soliciting non-media companies like non-profits and governmental organizations in addition to integrating more deeply into existing publishers’ websites.

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The Pluggd team is used to switching gears. The startup began in February 2006 as a destination site for podcasts. But after witnessing iTunes “suck the air out” of the market, it began developing speech recognition technology for video that could identify particular topics within news clips and other diverse content.

The venture, which was started by two former Amazon Web Services employees, has taken another step in the video direction by launching a full-blown Brightcove competitor called Delve Networks. Development began in earnest about ten months ago when Pluggd raised its Series A; the site went live just yesterday.

Like Brightcove – and several other platforms such as Maven Networks, Move Networks, and Ooyala – Delve Networks wants to manage and deliver video content for medium and large web publishers. Its management panel places uploaded videos into channels that are delivered through a customizable Flex-based player. Videos can be tagged, sorted into genres, and viewed through filters. The entire management experience is meant to be a large step up from that of Brightcove (and having suffered through Brightcove’s confusing user interface myself, Delve’s UI certainly appears much more intuitive).

Delve Networks is still putting the pieces together on some of the functionality publishers have come to expect, like analytics for tracking how videos are consumed. But the company has already rolled out is its primary differentiator: the same in-video topic highlighting technology it developed earlier while called Pluggd.

Publishers have the option of attaching a heat map of sorts to their videos. The map shows up below videos as a variously colored bar, which ranges from blue to red and activates when the user types in a particular topic. For example, if you’re watching a clip about a golf tournament, you can enter “Tiger Woods” and the bar will show you where the commentator spends time discussing and showing footage of that famous golf player. The topics are automatically detected by a combination of speech and contextual analysis, so publishers don’t have to break down their videos manually.

CEO Alex Castro tells me this technology engages viewers more effectively, and therefore monetizes them better as well. While the company is still working on the player’s user interface (and moderation panel for that matter) it has already signed up several beta customers including CNET, Intel, Small Screen Network, Jaudible, Bikini.com, and Wallstrip. Pricing has yet to be nailed down completely, but a free version for trial purposes will be made available in the next few weeks.

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Web video distribution player Brightcove is entering the Japanese market with a new subsidiary called Brightcove K.K. Rather than use some of the $86 million it has already raised, Brightcove sold off a piece of the subsidiary for $4.9 million to Japanese investors, some of whom will also act as sales and distribution partners. Participating in the round are Dentsu (biggest advertising company in Japan), J-Stream (biggest content delivery network in Japan), Cyber Communications (biggest online ad network in Japan), and existing Brightcove investor Transcosmos (Japanese media conglomerate).

Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire says in an e-mail:

Japan is an outstanding market for Brightcove, with exceptionally high broadband penetration rates and the 2nd largest media market in the world. Amazing, online video (commercial, monetized online video) in Japan is a nascent industry

We have majority ownership and control over this subsidiary, and will be hiring a general manager as well as a staff of technical, sales, marketing and operational staff to build the business.

However, Brightcove K.K. also has several significant strategic partners who are collectively investing about $5M into Brightcove KK, and who are also going to act as sales and marketing agents for Brightcove in Japan. We don’t plan to build a lot of direct selling infrastructure in Japan, instead leveraging the robust sales teams and customer footprints of our partners.

J-Stream will be offering Brightcove video streaming as a service to its customers, while Dentsu and Cyber Communications will be selling ads across the Brightcove K.K. network.

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When it comes to streaming HD video on the Web, Move Networks is becoming one of the preferred video streaming partners for many major media sites, including ABC.com, Discovery.com, ESPN.com,and Fox.com. According to the company, it collectively streams videos to 6.5 million people a month, who average 50 minutes of viewing time per session. But Move requires that viewers install its own proprietary video player as a plug-in to their browsers. So in a way it competes with Flash, which is getting better all the time. (Brightcove is taking a different approach by experimenting with BitTorrent and other technologies to create high-quality video experiences through a Flash player). High-definition streams still tend to run into network bottlenecks and slow connection speeds at people’s homes. Whoever can solve or bypass these problems will become adopted by more video sites as the demand for HD video rises.

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I asked Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire why he decided to throw in the towel on Brightcove.TV. His response:

We are not throwing in the towel on Brightcove.TV, we are eliminating its use as an end-user sharing service. Note that the vast majority of programming on Brightcove.TV are professional channels published by media businesses that use our overall platform for their websites and syndication. It will continue to operate as a content showcase of pro publishers using the Brightcove Platform.

He further states in this blog post that the eight million monthly unique visitors to Brightcove.TV (as reported by comScore) is “dwarfed by the adoption of our Internet TV platform by media businesses around the world.” He counts 4,000 such media publishers, who collectively attract “over 120 million uniques visitors per month across thousands of websites.” Brightcove.TV was always a sideshow.

Even though Brightcove.TV will continue to operate and showcase videos from Brightcove’s partners, it will no longer accept videos from consumers. I am tempted to put it in the deadpool, but will refrain for now. If it disappears completely, or arises Zombie-like in the future, we will let you know.

Maybe the problem was that not enough regular people uploaded their clips to Brightcove.TV in the first place. Instead it is filled with cheesy trailers like this one for, ahem, Dead or Alive:

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Time for another roundup, and this one coincides with a notable first-year anniversary: that of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, confirmed on October 9th, 2006.

Since then, the name “YouTube” has become virtually synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month. Second-place Yahoo Video trails with 48,026,000 visitors. But must YouTube remain the clear winner in the online video space? While they have certainly captured the largest audience – which may in the end be all they had needed to do to secure their position – we shouldn’t underestimate the many other companies vying for mindshare.

Even if YouTube remains the destination of choice for the vast majority of consumers, producers ought to take a serious look at the alternative services. They often support more file types, bigger uploads, and higher resolutions. They also place fewer restrictions and provide an array of features simply overlooked by YouTube. That said, a few of these services are mere YouTube clones and hope to follow in YouTube’s footsteps by providing very basic features.

These are the services we looked at: blip.tv, Brightcove.tv, ClipShack, Crackle, DailyMotion, Sony eyeVio, Google Video, Megavideo, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Spike (ifilm), Stage6, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.

Since they are all about 80% the same, I’m not going to go through each of them one-by-one at length. However, there are some overall trends that ought to be pointed out, as well as some key differentiators. To get into the details as to how all of these websites differ, check out the comparison chart we’ve provided above. You’ll notice that there are some gaps, so please email me if you can help us fill in the holes.

First of all, only YouTube, DailyMotion, and Metacafe appear to place any hard restrictions on video length. With the rest, video lengths are determined indirectly by file size restrictions. While YouTube and several of these sites place the file size cap at 100mb per upload, others place it higher at 250mb, 500mb, or 2000mb. Veoh places no limitations on file size, but they recommend you use their desktop player for files over 100mb. If you’re willing to fork over some cash for a premium membership, Brightcove.tv and Motionbox will also let you upload files of any size.

While YouTube allows users to upload files only formatted as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG, other services accept a much greater range of file types. If you want to make your life easier, however, get into the habit of encoding in .MOV (Quicktime) and you’ll be welcome at almost all of these sites.

When it comes to video quality/resolution, it’s not perfectly clear how these services compare, because most of them don’t state their video bit rates or explain their transcoding processes. However, several of them clearly blow YouTube out of the water. Stage6, a DivX-based service, and Sony’s eyeVio, a Japanese-only service, support the most stunning video quality. Videos hosted by Veoh and Crackle also look very sharp.

Out of all these alternative services, blip.tv stands out as the most professional video sharing solution. The website and player are cleanly designed, they accept perhaps the widest range of file formats, they will automatically syndicate your videos to many other websites, and you can choose to place midroll, postroll, adjacent, and overlay advertisements in your uploads. Additionally, you can track your shows’ statistics quite closely and allow users to download your videos. I could go on and on about blip.tv’s useful features. The only major bummer with blip.tv is that you can’t seek ahead to points in a video using their Flash player.

It’s no surprise that shows like Rocketboom have decided to migrate over to blip.tv. We even decided to use them for our TechCrunch40 conference. And PC World agrees with us that blip.tv tops them all.

While we have a strong preference for blip.tv, the others have their own peculiarities that may make them more attractive to you. ClipShack, while mostly a YouTube clone, has an area where you can use a webcam to add movie, book, video game, and TV show reviews directly to the site. Crackle serves as a talent discovery system through which amateur producers can win a chance to pitch ideas to Sony and other media executives.

Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Megavideo support a wide range of languages. Sony eyeVio, which unfortunately doesn’t plan to roll out an English version, enables users to download videos straight to their PSPs, Walkmans, iPods, and mobile phones. Metacafe and Megavideo both have programs with which they pay content creators according to how many people view their videos. Motionbox, the most private of the services, has a video player with a unique filmstrip that can be used to visually locate segments in a video (they also provide a simple online video editor).

Revver provides a WordPress plugin so that video bloggers can upload and manage their content more efficiently. Veoh lets you both upload videos to other sharing sites and watch videos from all over the Web in its download client. Vimeo sports the best-designed website and a strong community feel. And Viddler’s player packs in a bunch of features, including the ability to leave comments in videos at particular points.

Since embeddable video players are the faces of these services, we have placed screenshots of them below (click to enlarge). We are also in the process of uploading a sample video to each of these websites so you can compare their video qualities. Links to these videos can be found in the comparison chart.

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Now BitTorrent is taking another try at legal torrenting by applying the power of peering to content its partners want to be shared, free files and streaming video. The new service, BitTorrent DNA (Delivery Network Accelerator), uses torrents to assist in sharing these files with their users. It effectively creates a virtual network of viewers’ computers that will share amongst themselves to speed up downloads for popular files from your servers.

The peering arrangement sounds a lot like what BitTorrent currently does, share large files amongst many user. DNA’s big difference, however, is that it does this more transparently. Viewers don’t need to search for tracking files and deal with a torrent download manager, but instead simply install a new BitTorrent client (around 330 K) that handles everything when they come to a DNA enabled site. For example, when you’re on a site and halfway through watching a movie or downloading a file, DNA shares these files behind the scenes with other users that need it too. If you’re concerned about sharing being too much of a drag on your bandwidth, you can go into your control panel and shut off the “download acceleration”.

The main selling point is that BitTorrent should reduce your bandwidth costs, meaning publishers can hold on to more of their ad revenue. The savings is expected to be pretty significant, with BitTorrent saying their customers can shift as much as 80% of their content delivery to the P2P network. Brightcove, one of their launch partners, will be using the peering technology to serve their high bandwidth video content for a new product, “Brightcove Show“.

By teaming up with BitTorrent, Brightcove hopes to take on Joost by allowing its network of Web video publishers to stream broadcast-quality, full-screen videos (possibly even up to HD-quality) without the need for a separate, walled-garden application. The videos will just stream directly from the Web, with bits being pulled from other people’s computers who have the BitTorrent DNA client and have watched a particular video, combined with bits delivered from the Limelight content-delivery network when there aren’t enough BitTorrent peers available to do the job.

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VideoEgg has certainly been doing this for a year or so. In a comment to that post, though, an (unconfirmed) ex-YouTuber says the idea was “discussed long ago inside the company” and follows up with:

All other video sharing websites that came out around the time YouTube emerged were still using Quicktime or Windows Media. YouTube might as well accuse VideoEgg of stealing the idea of using a Flash video player.

Next up was Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan, who emailed me to say that Adbrite has had their own overlay product for nearly a year. He also pointed out that I wrote about it. The ad unit is less sophisticated, but it is certainly a Flash video overlay ad unit.

And finally, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire sent me a long email saying they’ve been doing this as far back as October 2005. He also says the ad units are not particularly popular with advertisers:

I caught your post on VideoEgg taking credit for video overlays as an ad format vis a vis the latest YouTube ad product introduction.

To reinforce this point, while I don’t want to claim “invention”, we were certainly very well ahead of the market when we introduced video overlay ads back in October of 2005, just as YouTube was getting their first pirated episodes of The Sopranos on their site. At the Web 2.0 conference that fall, Brightcove debuted our beta service and as part of that both demo’d and discussed how we wanted to changing video and television advertising with new formats that could engage the user in a non-intrusive manner while creating opt-in ‘takeover sponsorship’ units that a marketer would be excited about. We demo’d overlay ads from Coca Cola running in a MTV Networks channel that we were just launching with them. The New York Times covered this debut.

We subsequently demo’d and introduced these formats again at AdTech in New York that fall, and if you speak with any number of a major content owner brand partners, it has been part of our platform since then, along with a wide range of other innovations in video ad formats, policies and targetting mechanisms.

Interestingly, despite having been 18+ months “ahead of the market”, to our disappointment, there has been extremely limited uptake by the advertising community around these formats. There are a lot of factors behind this limited uptake, including:

- the advertising community buying video have been very focused on leveraging existing creative and buying patterns in the online video space
- most content publishers and media owners have been focused on getting the ‘basics’ up and running, and also responding to the RFPs from marketers and advertisers, which are almost 100% focused on basic short-form video commercials
- for premium brands and content, the basic pre-roll and companion banners are yielding extremely attractive CPMs and there is little evidence that :15 ads have any negative impact on end-user viewership behavior — in fact, our own metrics show that sites that run without any ads, and then introduce :15 pre-rolls and banners achieve identical usage and performance (e.g. no drop-off in users because of ads) on their content.

Nonetheless, we remain very bullish about ‘composite’ video advertising formats that combine overlays and unique and non-intrusive calls to action with deeper interactive marketing experiences. We’ve been pushing this for years and only now are starting to see the publishers and media owners that we work with begin to take an interest in these formats. I believe this is because we’re now entering a phase where content companies are looking at ways to maximize yield and revenue within their content, and they are introducing more mid and long-form content which require, by economic necessity, a different suite of formats to deliver a good user experience.

So where does that leave us? Maybe none of these startups did – Om says it all goes back to old school television. We’ll see if VideoEgg’s patent filing is unique enough to be issued. But they’ve already said they won’t be using it offensively to stop others from doing this. The market will sort it all out.

cartoon credit: the amazing Hugh MacLeod

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Starting immediately, Fox Broadcast Net, FX and Speed is available via ad-supported Internet video channels using Brightcove technology with more content to follow.

Brightcove has existing agreements with CBS, Discovery, MTV Networks, National Geographic, Showtime, Rainbow Media, Buena Vista TV, Dow Jones, BSkyB and the New York Times, although none so far have been exclusive as this new deal is said to be.

As Beet.tv notes, the deal will also allow embedding of Fox programs on external sites.

Brightcove is backed General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners, AOL, Hearst Corp and IAC to the tune of $59+ million.

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